The Player Season/Career Finders are a great starting place for a first-time Baseball Stathead user. Learning to use these tools will also provide invaluable indoctrination, as the search fundamentals you will utilize are applicable to our other tools, which drill down a little deeper, as well. The basic gist of these tools is that they’re the place to go when you’re looking to place a player’s season or career stats in perspective.

Here are some sample searches you can run using these tools. If you click "See how this search was built" after following the link, you can see how the search form was manipulated in order to achieve the desired results:

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There's been much debate about the greatest players in NBA history of late. One of the most difficult things about ranking players in a league with 70+ years of history is that the game has changed a lot over the years. Sure, some of it has to do with the skill and quality of the players. But some of it also has to do with the quality of the balls, the floors, the rims, the training, the travel, the accommodations, available nutrition and pretty much any other variable you can think of. For a better idea of how the league has changed over time, please see this table of league averages for each season in the history of the NBA. As you can see, 2019-20 is the fifth straight season in which a new league-wide eFG% record has been set. There are clearly things at play here beyond just player improvement. Though today's players are certainly more skilled than the ones that produced a league-wide 27.9 FG% in 1946-47 (the first year of the NBA's 'official' forerunner the BAA, which was objectively worse than the league it eventually merged with, the NBL).

To help bring a bit of objectivity to cross-era comparisons, we have added an Adjusted Shooting table to all player, team and season pages. These tables will show a player's shooting percentages and tendencies, as well as league-wide percentages and tendencies, and then scale them. Like OPS+ on our baseball site it will be scaled so that 100 represents a league-average shooter. 125 is 25% better than average and 75 is 25% worse than average. These figures are obtained by taking the player's shooting percentage, dividing it by the league-wide shooting percentages and then multiplying it by 100. So 125 doesn't mean a player was 25 percentage points above average, but 25 percent above average. We are also publishing adjusted versions of 3-point Attempt Rate and Free Throw Rate to give a better idea of how often the player shot 3s or got to the line relative to their era.

Additionally, we have calculated Field Goal Points Added and True Shooting Points Added to show how many points each player scored above or below what a league average player would have scored given an equal number of field goal attempts or true shot attempts, respectively. This is to show which players combined volume and efficiency (or those that combined volume with inefficiency, for that matter).

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In February, our pro basketball site incorporated Daniel Myers' BPM 2.0, the update to the classic Box Plus Minus measurement. We have now completed that update for College Basketball Reference as well. BPM 2.0 aims to estimate a player's performance relative to league average by using a player's box score information and his team's overall performance.

BPM 2.0 will appear on College Basketball Reference in the same places you found old BPM, and is available back to the 2010-11 season. Leaderboards have been updated to reflect the new measurement. BPM 2.0 also allows for game-level calculations, which means that our box scores since the 2010-11 season will now include BPM 2.0 in the Advanced table.

For more information on why the update was made, you can refer to our February blog post on the BBR update, as well as Daniel Myers' in-depth explainer on how BPM 2.0 is calculated. We thank Myers for his contributions and we hope you enjoy the addition to College Basketball Reference.

FBref covers basic and advanced statistics for dozens of domestic leagues around the world, with the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A and French Ligue 1, commonly referred to as the "Big 5", being the most visited league stat pages. Up to this point, if you wanted to compare statistics between the leagues, you'd need to have a tab open for each one.

That will no longer be as necessary now that FBref has added combined Big 5 stat pages, with a combined league table, leaderboards across the 5 leagues and stat registers that include players who've played in any of the leagues. In the Player Standard Stats section, sorting by G+A-PK per 90 minutes gives you Jadon Sancho (Bundesliga), Kylian Mbappé (Ligue 1) and Lionel Messi (La Liga) at the top this season. In the Squad Goal and Shot Creation section, you can see Bayern Munich and Dortmund are leading all Big 5 teams in Goal Creating Actions per 90 minutes.

Check out our new Combined Big 5 pages and so much more that we offer at FBref! You can keep up with the latest additions of statistical coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for the This Week in Sports Reference mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

Baseball-Reference's Awards index covers all the major awards MLB has established over the years. In the past, we had some awards combined, such as MVP and Cy Young, on the same page. We've recently made a change to our Awards page so that each award is now given its own table, which allows for providing more statistical context than we previously did in these sections. For example, here's a link to our updated Cy Young Award page; you'll notice that you can now sort by the different basic pitching stats, if you wanted to take a quick glance at highest ERA (LaMarr Hoyt in 1983) or most innings pitched (Steve Carlton in 1972).

Take a look at our Awards index and scroll through the pages of baseball history at Baseball-Reference.com! Please let us know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame 2010s All-Decade Team was announced a while back, and Pro Football Reference now lists the team in its Awards section, as well as in the Awards table on player pages for those who were selected. This year's All-Decade team had the peculiarity of being released without a first-team/second-team distinction, the first time that's happened since the 1960s All-Decade team. With that, our Hall of Fame Monitor also made a small change to its methodology to accommodate this; you can read the formula used for that here.

Here's a look at some of the more interesting impacts All-Decade selections might have on Hall of Fame cases:

Running Backs: Adrian Peterson and Frank Gore were already on their way to Canton, but All-Decade selections greatly help LeSean McCoy, Marshawn Lynch and Darren Sproles' future cases. McCoy's HOFm score is now at 80.76, moving him ahead of current top eligible RB Roger Craig. Lynch's score is now 68.94, which puts him just below the lowest-scoring HOFers who played in the 1980s or later. Sproles took a major jump to 64.4 thanks to making the All-Decade team on offense and special teams, and now finds himself in the range of borderliners Ricky Watters and Shaun Alexander.

Wide Receiver: This position is a little more scattered in terms of predicting who ends up making it in, but Calvin Johnson, Julio Jones and Antonio Brown will appreciate having their names in here. Considering his off-the-field meltdown, Brown is the strangest HOF case, but on paper his HOFm score is now at 89.12, which puts him right next to HOFer Art Monk and within sniffing distance of Michael Irvin.

Offensive Line: Jason Peters gets a healthy boost as he approaches the end of his career, his new HOFm score putting him inbetween HOFers Rayfield Wright and Orlando Pace, as well as right next to perennial finalist Tony Boselli. Jahri Evans and Marshal Yanda also got elevated into the mix of HOF guards with this selection.

Defensive Line: Calais Campbell gets some help for his HOF case with this selection, putting himself in the range of the highest borderline defensive ends like L.C. Greenwood and Neil Smith.

We hope you enjoy this addition and use it as a reference in friendly debates to come. Please let us know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

The Korea Baseball Organization had their Opening Day this week, and Baseball Reference will be tracking 2020 KBO stats as the season moves forward. In addition to the current season, we have filled in our site's KBO history. Now we have individual and team batting and pitching statistics back to the league's founding in 1982, as well as fielding statistics back to 2001.

You can now back and look at MLB players who made a stop in KBO, such as Julio Franco's 22-HR, 110-RBI season in 2000 (at age 41!), or Eric Thames' 3 seasons with the NC Dinos before making his MLB return with the Milwaukee Brewers.

As for current players to look out for, you have former Minnesota Twin ByungHo Park, who already hit a home run on Opening Day this week and is hoping to notch another 30-HR KBO campaign under his belt. Keep an eye on veteran Kia Tigers pitcher Hyeon-jong Yang, who had one of his best years in 2019. Recent MLB players who are making their KBO debuts in 2020 include White Sox/Brewers infielder Tyler Saladino and journeyman starting pitcher Dan Straily, his last MLB appearance coming with the Baltimore Orioles.

We're excited to keep track of another active baseball league (check out our 2020 CPBL statistics as well!). Please let us know if you have any comments, questions or concerns.

In February, Basketball Reference made a major update in incorporating Daniel Myers' BPM 2.0, which aims to estimate a player's performance relative to league average by using a player's box score information and his team's overall performance. This statistic is also calculable at the game level, and we've made it easier to look through this by making BPM searchable in Basketball Reference's Game Finder, one of the many tools you can find in the site's Play Index.

BPM 2.0 is searchable back to the 1984-85 season, when we first have 100% coverage of all the statistical components needed to calculate this. It's important to note that BPM is a rate stat, so setting a minutes played threshold will be important. Here's a look at the top games in our system using a couple of different thresholds:

Minimum 10 MP

Minimum 20 MP

Minimum 30 MP

Minimum 40 MP

In addition to the Game Finder addition, Basketball Reference now has mouseovers in the advanced section of box scores that display the offensive and defensive BPM breakdowns, as well as Value Over Replacement Player prorated to 82 games. For more information on how BPM 2.0 is calculated, please consult Daniel Myers' explainer. Stay tuned to the Sports Reference Blog for the latest additions to Basketball Reference!

If you haven't read it already, please read Mike Lynch's rundown of our new Stathead/Baseball service. I'm going to lay out some of the background for this change and explain some of the changes.

As I laid out in our post from early March, we are making changes to our Ad-Free and Play Index products.

Here is the thrust of what we said in March.

So we are making some changes. The Play Index for each site will be moving to Stathead.com. Stathead.com will become the center for all of our subscription products. We expect these products to include tools and information beyond just a redesigned set of Play Index tools. This won't happen all at once, but we'll start with baseball and then proceed through the remainder of our sports. Also, we will be ending our ad-free product and instead Stathead memberships will have ad-free built-in. There just aren't enough users to justify a separate ad-free product. These changes will begin this month and continue through April on baseball and then continue with the other sites after that.

If you are a subscriber, we will make every effort to make certain you are happy with the options we provide to convert your ad-free or Play Index subscription over to Stathead including the option of a refund on your subscription. You will be hearing more from us about the changes over the next few weeks as we will email users directly.

If you've looked at the cost of Stathead/Baseball vs the Play Index, you'll notice we've gone from $36/year (+ $20/year for ad-free) to $8/month. I realize this is a significant increase. As I said in my original post, we are extraordinarily reliant on ad revenue. Back in early March this seemed problematic. Now with the complete collapse of the advertising market it has the potential to be lethal. If you don't block our ads, you may have noticed that we now have more ads on our pages. This is in response to the downturn in ad revenue. Sports Reference is doing fine right now, but if we want to continue to succeed and also be aligned with the needs of our users, a healthy stream of subscription revenue is vital.

We also feel our products warrant this price. The only comparable products to our Stathead tools come from Elias and STATS LLC and would cost you $10,000+ a year to subscribe to. You could create your own from Retrosheet data, but that would probably take more than $8/month of your time to maintain.

We are using monthly billing for at least the first few quarters, so that we can monitor more directly the success we are having in recruiting and maintaining subscribers. We have discussed adding an annual billing option in the future.

For the time being, we will be maintaining both the legacy Play Index site (which has been free since the start of March) and the new site, but before too long we will take down the old Play Index site, probably late May. We are also working on converting the other Play Index sites. First will be hockey and then probably basketball after that.

We realize there aren't games being played and that you might be facing your own financial challenges at this time. Therefore, we are offering the first month free for all users. And then, until the leagues start playing games, we will be giving users the option of claiming additional free monthly subscriptions. We'll provide more details on the latter plan as we approach the time for subscriptions to be renewed.

If you are a current subscriber, we will be emailing you with information about how we will be converting your subscription to the new system and of course, we will provide your money back if you are unhappy with the conversion to Stathead that we are offering you. Our goal is to give you a more than fair deal and see you join us on stathead.com.

Please feel free to reach out to us if you have questions or concerns.

--sean forman

Today Baseball Reference is excited to announce the debut of most powerful set of publicly available research tools in the game. We're calling it Stathead and you can sign up for a free month of access here. These tools may be familiar to some of our users from the Play Index. If you're a current Play Index subscriber, your Play Index login will also work on Stathead. You can try it out here. For some background on this project, please see this blog post from Sports Reference president Sean Forman.

Stathead subscriptions provide access to a suite of tools that allow users to run customized searches through 100+ years of career statistics, season statistics, game statistics, splits and play-by-play. These tools are omnipresent in every press box, broadcast booth, agency and front office in Major League Baseball. We're happy to offer access to these professional tools for the low cost of $8/month. Even better, for a limited time we're offering the first month FREE. For more info on Stathead subscriptions, please click here.

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